Early this afternoon, while strolling around downtown Bethesda, Md., near my home, I saw two people sharing a table at an outdoor cafe, both staring at their phones; pedestrians crossing streets while texting; driver after driver holding phones; and a young woman on a bike, talking on the phone. People say “wearable technology will be part of our future but it strikes me that people are already all but surgically attached to their phones.

It’s hard to remember a time when most people didn’t carry mobile phones but, in fact, it wasn’t that long ago: the late 1990s.* Now that mobile technology is ubiquitous, cell phone manufacturers and wireless carriers have to work harder to sell new phones. This explains the TV and Internet ads you have surely seen this summer, touting more frequent upgrades.

That marketing campaign is the topic of my latest column for Guardian Sustainable Business. Here’s how it begins:

Can you remember life without a cellphone? In the late 1990s, only one in five Americans had one. Today, there are 102 active mobile phonesor connected tablets for every 100 Americans, according to CTIA, The Wireless Association.

This is a problem for the cellphone industry. Now that the industry has sold a phone or tablet to just about everyone in the US, the challenge is to sell more of them, more often, by persuading people to get rid of the perfectly good ones they now possess and upgrade to the new new thing.

It’s a classic example of consumerism run amok. Surely you’ve seen the marketing, which has exploded in recent months on TV and online.

“Two years is too long to wait for a new phone!” says T-Mobile, which recently introducing a replacement program called Jump! “Upgrade to the phone you want twice every 12 months, not once every two years.”

About 152 million cell phones were discarded in 2010, according to EPA. Only about 10 percent of those were recycled. Most end up in desk drawers, attics or, worst of all, landfills. What can be done? Read the column.

*For the record, I bought my first cell phone in 2001, after the September 11 terrorist attacks. I love my iPhone. It’s a marvelous device. But I try to remember that I lived most of the life without one.

Dave Gardner is a gutsy guy. Gardner, who is 56, a former corporate filmmaker, set his career aside a few years ago to run for office in his hometown of Colorado Springs, CO, and make a documentary film called Growthbusters: Hooked on Growth that puts forth an unpopular idea–that economic growth is bad for the environment and bad for human happiness.

“I want to make it OK for people to be against growth,” Dave says, when asked why he ran for office and made the movie.

Dave and I fundamentally disagree. I think economic growth is vital, not just to lift billions of people out of poverty–global per capita income is currently about $10,700, if Wikipedia is to be believed–but because societies that are more prosperous are better able to deal with the issues of environmental and social justice that matter most to me.

Nevertheless, I would urge you to see Dave’s film (screenings are listed here, or you can buy the DVD) both because he raises a number of important questions and and because, to his credit, has managed to capture on film some of the world’s most provocative thinkers on the topic of growth–Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford professor and author of the controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb, sociologist Juliet Schor, whose books include The Overworked American, the heretical economist Herman Daly, environmental activist and author Bill McKibben, and the charismatic political economist and author Raj Patel. [click to continue…]